About the book: 2021 / The view of the “Soviet man” presented in the book allows us to see behind this seemingly empty ideological formula many specific discursive practices and biographical strategies , with the help of which Soviet people tried to give their lives meaning, corresponding to the historical imperatives of the Stalin era. The immediate subject of the study is the genre of the diary, which made it possible to turn the ideological criteria of time into a factor in the psychological construction of one’s own personality. The heroes of the book - peasants and representatives of the urban intelligentsia who fled to the city, who worked as rural teachers, engineers and writers - used the diary as a way of introspection and self-education, turning existing cultural patterns into the horizon of internal formation, making history part of their Self.